The case to automate

For many people automation is no more than a buzz word, and really, how many more of those can we handle? However, the benefits are irrefutable.

Whether your communications are business-facing, consumer-facing or internal, marketing automation can streamline your workflows – allowing you to spend time where you really need to.

What is marketing automation?

According the Salesforce, “Marketing automation is technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.”

Let’s unpack the benefits of marketing automation

1. Automation can help you target customers with messages across email, web, social and SMS 
2. Don’t know where to start? Marketing automation workflows can be defined with pre-built templates, custom built from scratch or modified mid-campaign to achieve better results 
3. Automation can increase revenue by shortening sales cycles 
4. Automated processes maximise efficiency by handling repetitive tasks so you can turn your attention to higher–order problems. Human error is also reduced
5. Automation usually increases leads 
6. Prospects can be nurtured more effectively and in a timely way 
7. If you segment your communications and stakeholders (and you should), automation can reduce the duplication of effort 
8. Automation delivers personalisation at scale, and with scalability 
9. It can help you evaluate the quality of leads and qualify your customers and clients against objective benchmarks 
10. Automation can also help you visualise and better understand your customer journeys 

In practice, Marketing automation lets you implement a digital marketing strategy without having to manually press “send” on each and every email, message, campaign, or post you create. 

Good automation tools help you identify your audience, design the right content, and automatically trigger actions based on schedules and customer behaviour. 

Putting Marketing Automation to work

This technology may sound complex, and as powerful as it is, many of the industry–leading solutions offer drag and drop interfaces, allowing you to map a customer journey or decision tree with the click of a mouse.  

Marketing automation is not set and forget. Analysing trends and understanding customer pain points allow marketers and communications professionals to adjust on the fly and deliver a best-in-class customer experience, resulting in journeys that delight customers and deliver real business outcomes. 

Investing and delving into marketing automation doesn’t mean untangling your existing marketing stack. Many of the leading platforms integrate quickly and easily via APIs. Think about marketing automation as an opportunity to supercharge your existing marketing efforts, not an exercise in feasibility studies and endless vendor assessments. 

Getting the recipe right

Real world examples of how marketing automation can be used in your business include: 

• Sending a webinar or virtual event reminder email series 
• Delivering gated content and updating and creating deals in your CRM 
• Sending abandoned cart reminder messages for e-commerce sites 
• Collecting feedback following a purchase or interaction with your business 
• Welcoming a new subscriber that signs up to your email list 
• Segmenting contacts by tagging individuals and delivering targeted content 

Keen to hear more about how marketing automation could assist your business? Get in touch with Senior Digital Consultant, Cameron Wong.

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